


tried a few pieces and hoped that they'd fit

by allapplesfall



Category: Blindspot (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And Jewel Staite, Brief Mention of Anti-Semitism, F/F, Mentions of Gambling Addiction, Minor Angst, Puzzles, Some Mocking of the Color Red, Sorry Jewel Staite, and then some mouth to mouth, and then they have a lil heart to heart, basically the girls who can solve puzzles actually get to solve the puzzles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 03:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10778460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allapplesfall/pseuds/allapplesfall
Summary: Kurt and Jane, while awesome, aren't all that great at puzzles.Tasha and Patterson, on the other hand, are.Somehow this ends with them strapped to a polygraph. Neither of them are quite sure why.





	tried a few pieces and hoped that they'd fit

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have time to write this, I say, pulling open a word document. I should really be doing my fifty homework assignments, I insist, writing down the first few lines. This isn't happening, I declare, opening SS scripts and copying Jewel Staite dialogue.
> 
> Anyway, this was supposed to be fluffy, and it is. Like, mostly.

“You couldn’t have found…anything else?” Tasha grumbles, pulling her red beanie down at the back. “The FBI suddenly has no undercover budget?”

Patterson manages a grin, her cheeks pinked by the chilly breeze. “It’s cute. Coding chic for the coder. The leather jacket’s a nice touch, too.” She gestures down to her own outfit. “Me, on the other hand…”

“I don’t know,” Tasha says, her lips quirking, “I think HR got a call from the 1950s last week. Red plaid is coming back.”

Patterson wrinkles her nose, amused, and turns to scan the street. The grey sky weighs low on the industrial buildings, the brickwork fading beneath layers of graffiti. A fair number of people, bundled in lighter spring coats, skitter from building to building. None of them look particularly suspicious, but to Patterson, whose anxiety is beginning to burrow into her spine, the whole scene feels like it’s holding its breath. She can feel Jane and Kurt’s watchful gazes dancing around her back. They do nothing to dispel her trepidation.

“Are they coming?” she asks, turning back.

Tasha shrugs, taking stock of the other direction. Patterson can see the lines of her shoulders fighting to relax, drawn in the way she does when she’s trying to make her stance a little less FBI. It’s funny, because Tasha doesn’t naturally look like she’s FBI—not when she’s sauntering next to Reade, teasing him, or when she’s spread out on Patterson’s couch, a box of chow fun on either side. But when she’s working, her whole body straightens out like a livewire. Her eyebrows set low on her forehead. Her muscles stay taut. Even her words fall more precisely. And then, when she’s undercover, she has to try to undo all of that and—well, it’s funny, is all Patterson’s saying.

She might watch Tasha a bit too much. Sue her.

They wait a bit more, crossing and uncrossing their arms, scuffing their feet along the sidewalk. Patterson’s about to suggest they call it a day when Tasha hisses, “ _On my eight_ ,” her fingers curling at her sides.

Two women, both in matching shades of vivid red, come up to them. “Follow me,” the brunette says brusquely. She turns and walks up the street.

Tasha and Patterson match them step-for-step, hurrying past storefronts and trying to keep track of where they’re going. As they walk, more people join them—mostly women, some blonde, some Latina, some neither, all dressed to the nines in scarlet. Together they flood down the street, a river of red that draws the eyes of wary New Yorkers. One child points at them before his father pulls him back, lifting him up and away from the mob. They continue for a few blocks before, abruptly, the first pair of women divert Tasha and Patterson into an alley. A van stalls, black and dark and open. They clamber in.

The men behind the wheel don’t say anything as they drive. When the handbrake clicks back into park, the one in the passenger seat sneers, “Get out.”

Patterson fumbles with the handle before stepping down into a new alley. A brick building stands in front of her, a single door waiting along the side. The second that Tasha comes out next to her, the van pulls away with a screech.

“That was a distraction,” Patterson says. “Dropping anyone who might be backup. Weller’s gonna go nuts.”

Tasha shrugs. “We didn’t have coms. They couldn’t have done much.”

“It’s Weller.”

Tasha purses her lips. “Yeah.”

“What’s the door say?” Patterson moves closer to the panel, kneeling to read the instructions. “‘The simplest answer gets you through the door. Be smart, you only get one try—no more.’ There’s a math puzzle under it…”

“Simplest answer?”

“ _Boings, flarps,_ okay, seventh-grade math, system of equations. That’s—yep—what?”

“Patterson, simplest answer.”

“But that’s _i_ over root 2, we can’t put that into a keypad…” Patterson’s brain is whirring, trying out hundreds of permutations of how to translate irrational digits into numeric ones, throwing out each possibility as she reaches it. She doesn’t quite realize she’s been staring blankly at the panel until Tasha reaches out and bumps her shoulder.

“ _Patterson_ ,” she says again.

“What?”

“Simplest answer.” Tasha reaches out and tugs at the door—it comes free with just the slightest pull. “See?”

Looking up at Tasha, at the gentle curve of her face framed by her almost-curls, at the way her eyes are sharp but down-to-earth; well, Patterson might just want to kiss her. A little bit. Or something.

“Oh,” she says. “Well, yeah. I guess that works. It’s boring, though.”

“C’mon in, nerd,” Tasha replies, failing to hide the fondness in her expression. Patterson accepts her offer of a warm, dry hand to help her up. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of chances for you to test your math voodoo.”

“It’s not _voodoo_ –”

Tasha rolls her eyes.

 

-

 

The inside of the building is a mess of colors. Seriously—Tasha’s not altogether certain they didn’t stumble onto the set of a skittles commercial. At least twenty duos stand in a vague blob in the center of a large, roughhewn room, each decked out in their own unique flavor of rainbow. They all stand close to their partner. They check out their surroundings as if walled in by a pack of wolves.

Honestly, Tasha would pay to see more than ten of these people try to turn the safety off a gun. Intellect may be dangerous, but dangerous doesn’t mean that they’re a threat.

The room falls to a hush as a figure walks down a flight of stairs, her hair braided back and her eyes glinting in the flickering light. Her clothes make her stand out against the exposed plumbing behind her. She cuts an imposing outline, her edges hard, her eyeliner dark. Then she starts honest-to-god _monologuing_ like she got a Groupon last week for acting lessons and decided to put them to good use.

And yeah, it’s cool and all that the Garen brothers are actually the Garen sisters, but to Tasha they’re still just very, very powerful felons. Them in jail would be doing the country a favor. Playing dress-up for some of the most dangerous hackers in the world seems reckless and not a little stupid.

But the upside is that when the woman goes all, “I'm Kiva Garen, co-founder of Leakhub,” Patterson’s face lights up. A small grin curls her cheeks, her hands fluttering at her sides, and she turns and stares at Tasha like ‘ _are you seeing this?_ ’ The red offsets the blue of her eyes, setting them sparkling in Garen’s melodramatic lighting. Tasha’s heart skips a beat, which is ridiculous because it’s—it’s just ridiculous, okay? Patterson shouldn’t be getting empowered by a lethal, world-renowned traitor turning out to be a woman. That’s against the FBI code or something.

Actually, she’s pretty sure that’s really against the FBI code.

But then Tasha has to stop thinking about Patterson, because Garen’s now saying, “But first, someone in here is lying about who they are. One of you is a cop.”

She turns, staring directly at Tasha. “What about you? Who do you think the cop is?”

Tasha’s spine tightens, but Patterson’s hand finds the small of her back and settles against it. It allows her to keep her hackles down enough maintain her poker face as she raises her eyebrows and replies, “How would I know?”

“Aw, take a guess,” Garen prods, a pout riding high on her lips.

Tasha bites her tongue and stares at her.

“How about her?” she asks, gesturing to a woman in white across the circle. “I think it’s her.”

Tasha grits her teeth. “I wouldn’t know,” she says, her voice even.

“Huh,” Garen shrugs, pulling out a gun from her belt and firing two shots into the woman’s chest. She topples, blood staining through the blouse. Her partner falls alongside her, his strings cut. Someone screams. The gunshots echo in the room, and Patterson flinches so _hard_. Tasha has to fight every urge to keep her hand from falling to her hip, to stop from stepping in front of Patterson and keeping her out of harm’s way.

“Relax. I already knew she was MI5,” Garen smirks as she holsters her gun, her eyes still dancing. “I just had to make sure nobody else was a narc, too. So does anybody have anything they'd like to confess?” There’s a long, drawn-out pause. “Very good. Moving on.”

 

-

 

“The doors to your rooms will unlock once you complete the final challenge, and the first ones to meet me in the boiler room get this,” Garen says, holding up a chip. People behind them are beginning to file into their color-coded rooms. “The world's most sought-after documents. The treasure chest you all came for. Good luck.” She turns, striding down the rest of the length of the hallway through the hallway and out of sight.

Patterson and Tasha reach the red door. After a quick glance at each other, they enter. An assistant, garbed in black, shuts the door behind them.

A screen on the wall declares, “Prove you can trust each other and you’ll find your fates will be forever intertwined.” As Patterson reads it aloud, she swears she sees Tasha’s eyes roll so far backwards that they spin all the way around.

“Jesus.”

“Is it just me,” Patterson wonders, “or does it feel like this woman failed a high school Shakespeare class and is really overcompensating?”

Tasha tries to hide her smile by inspecting the machinery by the far wall. She pauses when she reaches a pad and a wrist strap. “A polygraph?”

Patterson comes up behind her. “Guess so.”

"Shit," says Tasha; she's never passed a polygraph in her life. Patterson's heart hurts at the way she sets her jaw, genuinely nervous.

After a pause, the screen above them switches to a video feed. “ _Leakhub is built on the idea of complete transparency_ ,” Garen declares, “ _I need to be sure I can trust you and that you trust each other._ ”

“Why a polygraph?” asks Patterson.

“ _What was that? I can’t hear you."_

“It’s pre-recorded,” Tasha and Patterson say at the same time.

“ _I'm messing with you. This is all pre-recorded.  None of you had answering machines? Whatever. Figure out how to turn on your machine_.”

The screen freezes, apparently waiting for them to strap themselves in. Giving each other a shrug, they sit down in the chairs and fit the bracelets around their forearms.

“It’s not turning on,” Tasha observes.

Patterson appraises the computer. “That’s because it’s Windows 98,” she realizes. “Why the heck would she run highly delicate, storage-eating software on Windows 98?”

“Can you get us in?”

Patterson swivels in her hair, greeting Tasha with a deadpan look. After all she does for them, she has the audacity to ask if she can get into a machine she was using when she was thirteen? That’s just rude.

“Just get us into the computer, Patterson.”

“Yeah, okay.”

She works her way through the startup sequence, reaching a slight challenge when a password box pops up. It takes a second before she pulls up an auxiliary window and begins hammering in some good, old-fashioned HTML.

Tasha half-laughs beside her. “Want a hand?”

“Do it on your own computer.”

“Sure.” She copies Patterson’s actions and begins typing in code herself. “Can you imagine Weller doing this?”

“I’m good at puzzles,” Patterson mocks, dropping her voice down and grinning. “I don’t think he even knows how to code a loop. An if-else statement. Simple CSS.”

“I’d be surprised if he even knows what HTML _is_.”

“True,” she draws out the ‘ooh’ sound. “How did he think he could compete in a hacking event again?” There’s a ding from the monitor. “Oh, nice, I’m in.”

“Gimme a sec… Right with you.”

Above them, the screen unfreezes. “ _Did you have some nostalgia going on there? Fun warm-up, right? Okay, first question_ ,” says Garen. “ _How did you meet your partner and what was your first impression?_ ”

Tasha stares up at the display, incredulous.

“Which of us goes?” asks Patterson.

There’s a moment when they consider who has the least chance of ruining their covers. “Uh, me,” Tasha decides. She mouths something, but Patterson can’t catch it. She assumes it’s some variation on _‘god help me’_. Tasha takes a breath. “When I first met her, I thought she was the biggest nerd on the planet. She was running tech at my new job, except she’d taken a break and had some friends on Skype. Completely against the rules. They were playing that dumb board game, you know, the dungeons one? And she sat there and introduced herself while her friends pretended to take down a dragon.”

Patterson’s heart swells at the affectionate exasperation on Tasha’s face. The screen flashes green. _TRUE_ , it reads.

“ _Have the other person answer this next one_ ,” Garen instructs. “ _Has your partner ever broken the law? And hacking doesn’t count, come on, we all have a common denominator here_.”

Patterson pauses, turning to Tasha. “Yes,” she whispers. She clears her throat. “Yeah.”

“ _How_?”

“Our old boss got into some…some trouble.” Mayfair is being taken away and Patterson doesn’t do well with change and David is in a hole in the ground and Tasha and Reade aren’t telling her anything and _shit_. She blinks hard. Tasha not letting her in—that had hurt. That still hurts. “Tasha, she, uh, decided to help her out. Which is technically aiding and abetting a fugitive. Which is,” Patterson glances at Tasha, at the way her jaw is set and her knuckles are white, “illegal. I don’t think that bothers her. She’d do anything, really, if she cares about you. She’s loyal like that.”

Tasha turns her face away. The screen flashes green.

Above them, Garen’s lip curls in enjoyment. Even back when she was recording this, she must have anticipated getting to parse through their answers. “ _Have you ever lied to your partner? Was it about something important? And yes, I got most of these questions from a "Do You Know Your Partner" quiz in O Magazine.”_

Tasha’s face folds, a flame extinguished with a drop of water. “Yes,” she says. “It was.”

Patterson feels something in her chest sink. She doesn’t remember Tasha admitting to having lied, which means she still doesn’t know, which means—

“Sin of omission,” Tasha continues, “I was Catholic. We know all about that.” Her face is stony and she’s fixedly not looking at Patterson. “I haven’t told her a lot of things. Things about our friend. Things about our job. Things about me.”

There’s a long silence, the only sound Patterson’s pulse beating in her ears. Her fingers feel fuzzy and her mind feels slightly loose.

“ _Whatever you’ve said_ ,” Garen proclaims, “ _I’m going to guess it wasn’t enough._ ”

Tasha eyes slip closed for a second. Her spine straightens. Her eyebrows set low on her forehead. Her words come out clipped and precise. “There was a point,” she says, her voice as low as it would be in a confessional, “where I was so addicted to gambling that I almost lost my apartment. Almost betrayed our friends. And for every day that I came into work, Patterson told me—fuck, she asked me how I was. And I said _fine_.”

Patterson’s world tilts. Hurt is spilling through her chest, because now that she’s thinking about it, she remembers those months. Those months were the months where Tasha’s eyes were never without dark rings beneath them, when she smiled more rarely than she closed cases. She remembers cajoling her into going out for drinks, into watching movies, even into going to a street fair. She’d tried hundreds of ways to cheer her up, to wheedle out the truth—but every single time, Tasha had been lying to her. And why? Because she didn’t trust her?

“I regret it,” Tasha admits. Her voice is rough. “I rely on her, and she means a lot to me. I just wasn’t…I wasn’t ready. I was too far gone. There are places you can slip to, and once you’re there…” She shrugs, her shoulders tight. “It feels like you can’t get back up. But if I could take it back, I would.”

Patterson stares at the ground. Her mind feels like it’s spinning around in circles, always missing the necessary voltage to trip the ion channels, almost firing but not quite. She stares at Tasha openly, like she might shatter, and every second that Tasha looks away drives another needle through her chest. Her lip trembles. Her throat is hot and tight.

Tasha’s monitor blinks and reports, _TRUE_.

“ _Now,”_ Garen interrupts, “ _other partner—do you forgive them?”_

Patterson can’t pin two words together. She’s still stuck back at Tasha, lying to her, Tasha, not confiding in her, Tasha, sitting there with her hands splayed on the table, Tasha, her eyes wet and dark. But somewhere, through the pain and confusion and betrayal, there’s a certainty that builds in her lungs—something hard and white and solid, clear and crisp and bright. She stares at Tasha, her friend, the woman who’s just been metaphorically undressed by a Raoul Silva wannabe hacktress, and sorts her brain into two categories.

One, she’s so incredibly pissed at Kiva Garen that she wants to see her empire go up in burning, ash-streaked flames. Two—

“Yes,” she says, her voice cracking. “I forgive her.”

There’s a terrible, agonizing second where the monitor stays dark. Patterson tries to channel everything she’s ever loved about Tasha, her hair and her voice and her humor and her strength, into those seconds, into some sort of non-denominational Hail Mary. The clock on the wall ticks.

The screen turns green.

“ _Good!”_ Garen cheers. Tasha lets out a long, rattling breath. Patterson squeezes her eyes shut. “ _Now, one more_. _Would you ever sell your partner out?_ ”

The line of Tasha’s mouth hardens. “No,” she spits. “I almost did, and it was one of the worst mistakes of my life.”

 _TRUE_.

Garen crows, _“Excellent. Next challenge!”_

The screen cuts from her face to show a familiar-looking pyramid with an eye, framed in all corners by wheels and things that look like batteries. On the other side of the room, a lock pops. A keypad slides open, identical to the fake one that had greeted them at the front door. Tasha takes the opportunity to strip off the polygraph strap as if scalded. She stands, her fingers tapping her waist where her gun would normally be.

“What do you think the code is?” she asks, moving to inspect the keypad. Her voice is still slightly strained.

Patterson stares back up at the screen. “I know that eye,” she murmurs. “I know that.”

“It’s on every dollar bill ever, Patterson.”

“No, I mean–” She squints. “It’s different. And those batteries. I…” She racks her brain, her knuckles bumping together to her internal rhythm. “Why is it a Star of David?”

Tasha frowns.

“I mean,” she says, biting her lip, “it’s…” Realization strikes. She smiles, standing up to see it better. “Yep,” she mutters, “yep, yep, yep.”

“What is it?”

Picking up a spare piece of scratch paper, she begins scribbling down dates. “In the 1930s, there were a group of fringe conspiracy theorists who dreamed up all kinds of government plots,” she explains. “One of them involved the pyramid on the dollar bill.”

“Illuminati? Big Brother?”

“Almost. But these guys were also seriously anti-Semitic, so they brought it back to globalism—the theory that Jewish people control everything. They made huge posters that were almost like this, with the added triangle so it looked like the Star of David, and left them around Brooklyn. A Jewish organization objected—understandably—to the posters, and tore them down. One Jewish artist responded to the posters with a painting. He titled it…um...” She makes a few more marks. “226, because he said that was how many of the posters he’d had to get rid of. Try that, 226.”

Tasha plugs in the combination. The panel next to it pops open, and she turns, impressed. “How do you know that?”

“I went to see the exhibit with my brother when we were kids. It’s in the MCNY.”

“And you just…remembered it?”

Patterson shrugs. She’s not ready to look Tasha in the face just yet. “It reopened recently. Some hackers use it to tag any fascist site they want people to burn down—it’s an antifascist symbol now. Are there batteries inside the panel?”

“Yes.”

“Turn them so the positive ends alternate, the first one down, the second one up, the third down–”

“The fourth up.”

“Right.”

Tasha fiddles with the batteries, clicking them into place one by one. When she finishes, a red button pops out from the wall. A new message blinks onto the screen. “The button leads you out, but watch the glass,” Tasha reads. “You’ll fill the other room with lethal gas.”

Patterson looks up from her paper. She swallows, finally turning to face Tasha. “We’re not doing that, right?”

Tasha bites her lip and tugs on the back of her beanie. “It’s probably a prisoner’s dilemma.”

“So we wait? Isn’t this a race?”

“Try opening the wiring of the button.”

“I’m more likely to hit something that’ll trip the switch.”

“So what do we do?”

Patterson tries to think, but her brain’s still buzzing from the polygraph. Tasha just looks so small, standing in the middle of the room—she’s wearing Vans, not her usual heeled boots. She looks almost fragile, like she realizes there’s something choking the air between them. Patterson wants to kiss her and punch her at the same time.

What she has to do, unfortunately, is figure out a way to prevent highly classified files from falling into the wrong hands.

“Um,” she says, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “Um…” She stares around the room, at the vents and the random objects and clocks. Her gaze finally falls on the computers. “Why Windows 98?” she asks.

“What?”

“She could use the most sophisticated system ever, but she doesn’t. Why not?”

Tasha furrows her brow. “Fun?”

“Holy Sarenrae,” Patterson breathes. “Gas. Tasha, it’s a _window_.”

Tasha side-eyes the screen. “Not following.”

Patterson strides over to the other side of the room, where the group before them had entered. She pounds on the wall. “Hey!” she yells. “Hey!”

There’s muffled movement, and then someone is knocking back. “What?” they snap.

“We want you to press the button,” Patterson says. “Give us the gas.”

“Are you fucking serious, lady? We’re tryna _not_ do that.”

“Patterson,” Tasha intervenes, putting a hand on her arm and trying to tug her away. Patterson reaches up to squeeze her fingers, a silent ‘ _trust me, this time_ ’. Tasha meets her eyes, hesitates, then nods. She lifts her voice to call to the other room as well, “Do it.”

Patterson grins, whirling back to the desk and kneeling down under it to find the physical computers. She pries one open from the top and discards circuit-boards until she finds the big, bulky fan, still gasping from its attempt at cooling down the polygraph software. She pulls it out of the computer and climbs onto the chair so she can set it on the shelf right next to the air duct. She’s about to do reach down for the other one only to find it already being handed to her, passed from Tasha’s warm hands to hers. Just as she sets it next to the first on the shelf, a white gas tumbles out of the vent. Tasha pulls her down to the ground before she can breathe any of it in.

The fans dispel the gas.

A minute passes and they’re still not dead—they’re on the floor, Patterson tugged to Tasha’s chest, their fingers pushing into each other’s skin with nervous anticipation. But they’re not dead after a full minute, and the door clicks open.

They disentangle themselves, rushed, sprinting out into the corridor. The room next them still has a closed door; Patterson grins in satisfaction. They charge down the hallway, narrowly beating out an orange team who fling open their door mere seconds after them. Patterson makes it back to the boiler room almost in stitches, panting and grabbing at her knees. Tasha skids to a stop behind her, looking remarkably more composed.

“Well,” Garen says, grinning like a cat with cream, “I guess we have our winners, then. Women to women, right? How it was meant to be.”

When Patterson straightens, her face probably as red as her coat, Garen hands her a small, black chip.

 

-

 

“Hey,” Tasha says quietly. She leans against the doorway to the lab, watching Patterson sort through files with a methodical steadiness. In the hours since they returned from the scavenger hunt, Tasha’s changed back into her black button-up, and her hair is pulled back into its normal ponytail. She feels more put-together again, like she’s not hemorrhaging feelings all over the floor.

Patterson turns when she hears her voice, looking almost surprised to see her. She puts down her tablet on a table. “Hey.”

“I wanted to…” Tasha trails off, glancing down at the ground. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t gonna tell you like that.”

“You weren’t gonna tell me at all,” Patterson says plainly. There’s honesty, a certain kindness in her voice that makes Tasha look back up. Patterson’s eyes are tired, but she doesn’t seem angry. She just looks…a little sad. “I know addicts, Tasha,” she says. “Three, total. And all of you are proud, strong, stubborn-as-heck people. Addiction tries to steal your dignity. It tells you you’re happy, or you’re in control, or you’re fine, but it tries to hollow you out.”

Tasha wants to break her gaze again, wants to distract herself with something on one of the screens. But Patterson’s eyes are clear and almost brutally gentle, her mouth a bittersweet twist. It’s impossible to look away—Tasha’s is drawn in and repelled and longing all at once.

“Addicts don’t like to tell people, because if they tell people, they have to give up some dignity.” Patterson sighs, stepping forward. “You’re a proud asshole, Tasha, and I get it—I just didn’t think you had to have any dignity with me.”

Tasha blinks, hard. Her chest is painfully constricted.

“I’m, um, I’m gonna hug you now,” Patterson says. “So just like, brace yourself.”

She reaches for Tasha’s shoulders, wrapping her arms around her waist, and Tasha has to bite her lip to stop her chest from unspooling. She stares, deadpan, at the back of the room—she tries to pretend she can’t feel Patterson’s breath against her chest, or the heart that’s beating slightly too fast. Slowly, as though she’ll spook herself if she moves too fast, Tasha wraps her arms around Patterson’s back. She squeezes tightly, evenly, applying pressure the way Patterson likes it. Then she closes her eyes.

She doesn’t know how long she stays like that, breathing in Patterson’s cedarwood shampoo. She feels her jaw unclench first, then her neck, then her shoulders. Bit by bit, she relaxes. It’s been so long since she felt cared for that she can hardly reconcile her mind with her body. She almost misses the moment where Patterson’s face turns, her lips finding Tasha’s cheek with a careful, sweet kiss.

But then Tasha is moving, stepping back half a step, reaching for Patterson’s chin and pulling them back together again. Patterson’s lip gloss is smooth between her lips, warm and polished and sweet. There’s a second when she thinks she’ll have to stop, because she’s about to smile and kissing’s hard when you’re smiling, but she swallows it down and falls in love with the curve of Patterson’s mouth, with the way her eyes narrow in contentment. She’s been waiting to do this all day. She’s been waiting to do this for years.

Finally, eventually, they pull away—Patterson looks messy, surprised, and beautiful. She stares back at Tasha and whispers a small, breathless, “Oh.”

“Jane and Kurt wanted to go out for drinks,” Tasha says.

Patterson shakes her head. “No thank you,” she murmurs, almost desperate. “How about…”

“Your place?”

Patterson’s eyes would light the night sky. “Yeah.”

Tasha smiles, and she can’t remember the last time she’s felt so full of warmth. She feels like the sun, which is ridiculous, because she’s not a sunny person, but _God_ —she just wants to kiss Patterson until she can no longer even think to breathe. “Okay then, nerd, it’s a scavenger hunt. Find the clues. Guide us home.”

Leaning in, Patterson whispers, “You’re on,” and kisses her jawline.

Tasha swallows, her throat dry. “Yeah, never mind,” she concedes, taking Patterson’s cool hand in hers, “let’s go.”

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> come yell at me on tumblr @ohfucktherewashomework!
> 
> also, for anyone following along at home, watching war made us immune WILL be returning to big screens near you—just not for a little bit, okay? bear with this suffering student.


End file.
